‘In here.’
He pushed at a partly open door and found himself in a room furnished with cheap sofas. A blonde, sharp-featured woman in a black trouser suit stood behind one of them displaying a set of clawlike fingernails painted blue, with silver streaks added. How would those go down at Sunday mass? he wondered. Maybe they were detachable.
She repeated the bland ‘Yes?’ he’d heard over the intercom.
‘My first time here,’ he said. ‘You were recommended. Would you be Viktoriya?’
‘I’m Vikki, yes. Who sent you, then?’ Her accent had only the slightest trace of East Europe.
‘I didn’t catch her name. A Ukrainian lady.’
‘Where?’
‘Holland Park area.’ He was assessing the room, trying to decide if heavies were waiting nearby to deal with troublemakers. If Vikki was the madam, as it appeared, she’d need some back-up. For the present her hands rested firmly on the chair back. ‘I’ll be straight with you, Vikki. A friend of mine came here an hour or more ago.’
‘Who was that?’ she said and gave an ironic smile. ‘Another John Smith?’
He was through with the play-acting. The response car would be here any minute. ‘He was a police officer, wanting information from you. Where is he now?’
‘I don’t know who you mean,’ she said, dropping all pretence of charm. ‘No one came here saying he was from the police.’
‘He may not have shown you his warrant, but he must have asked you questions about girls who went missing twenty years ago.’
She hesitated. ‘That guy? He left some time back.’
‘It won’t do,’ he said. ‘He called me to say he was in trouble.’
Her eyes had turned to the left. He took a step closer and saw the monochrome screen she was staring at. He guessed the police had arrived.
‘Come on, Vikki,’ he said. ‘Do you want cops storming through every room in the building?’
Alarmed, she put a hand to her mouth. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she said, playing the innocent through the scary fingernails. ‘He came asking questions. Anyone could tell he wasn’t a punter.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I haven’t a clue.’
Then a shot was fired nearby, followed by another, somewhere outside the building. He knew gunfire. It wasn’t a firework or a car backfiring.
He started down the stairs just as the front door burst open and two uniformed cops from the Met charged in. They were ready to grab him until he pulled out his warrant card and shouted, ‘The garden.’
They carried on past the staircase and through a door at the back. Diamond followed them into a small kitchen where unwashed coffee mugs littered a table. One cop flung open the door to the garden, which was more of a concreted back yard than anything cultivated, a poor place to hide. A toolshed stood against a brick wall at the end. The cops went to look, with Diamond following, and the kitchen door slammed behind them.
He stopped, turned and tried the handle. The wind must have got behind it, not some inmate of the house, as he suspected, because it opened again.
‘No one here,’ shouted the cop who’d opened the shed.
His partner had made a leap at the wall and was hanging on by his arms, looking over. ‘Here!’ he yelled and scrambled up and out of sight. The other cop followed.
For a man of Diamond’s build, that wall was a major barrier, but he wasn’t giving up while Keith was in trouble. He took a wooden fruit box from the shed and stepped up, got a handhold, hauled his bulk to the top and toppled over. The two uniformed cops were already in hot pursuit of a man who had vaulted over a low garden fence into a neighbouring garden. A dog started barking and another responded from higher up. Suburban Barnes had not seen anything like it in years.
This second garden was heavily overgrown. Diamond hadn’t waded far through the sea of grass and weeds when he heard panting to his left. Briefly he thought of the dog and then recognised a human quality in the sound, more like someone gasping for breath. He forced his way through and found Keith lying on his back, his hand to his chest, blood seeping through his fingers.
Keith wasn’t speaking, but there was plenty of voice in his breathing, a rasp with each struggle for air. The signs were bad. A pink bubble formed between his lips and popped. If his lungs were filling with blood he wouldn’t last long.
Diamond took out his mobile and dialled for an ambulance.
He tried giving comforting words without knowing how much Keith understood. He was getting no response from the voice or the eyes.
In all his years in the police, he’d never had one of his team murdered. What could he do? You don’t move someone in a state like this, without knowing what damage the shooting has done, which vital organ the bullet may have pierced. The sense of helplessness was overwhelming. He knew about the so-called grace period from thirty minutes to an hour when the shock to the nervous system means that the victim is, in effect, anaesthetised. When that passes, the pain kicks in and can be fatal.
He looked around him. The garden was overgrown and the house appeared derelict. Really he could expect no help until the paramedics came. The two cops were off and away, chasing the man seen running from the scene. If they caught him they wouldn’t bring him back this way, over garden fences. They’d take him through the nearest house to the street and drive him straight to the police station.
And no one from inside number sixteen was going to venture into the garden and look over the wall. Any of the inmates who knew what was going on would have escaped by way of the street.
So he waited, powerless to act, and the minutes dragged.
Keith’s gasps for breath became shorter and more shallow.
At last came the twin notes of the ambulance approaching Marchant Street. The sound got louder and then stopped, followed by doors slamming. Would the crew find him? He’d tried to explain where he was to the operator who’d taken the emergency call, describing it as the garden backing on to number 16. He had no idea what this parallel street was called.
A voice came from behind the walclass="underline" ‘Where are you?’
He stood and shouted back.
A head appeared above the wall. ‘All right, mate. Stay cool.’
They slung a stretcher over first, and then followed.
He stood back to let the two paramedics assess the injury. It seemed Keith had taken a shot to the diaphragm, just inside the ribcage. While one was taking the pulse the other said to Diamond, ‘Why don’t you find the best way out of here? He’s in poor shape and we won’t want to lug him over that wall.’
Relieved to get any kind of activity, he went to check. Every muscle was shaking.
As he suspected, the house on this plot was empty, the lower windows boarded up. But there was a side gate on a rusty latch that he forced open. It gave access to the street. He jammed it open with a brick.
When he got back, the paramedics had transferred Keith to the stretcher and exposed his arm for an injection that he seemed not to feel at all.
‘You’ll have to help us get him to the ambulance,’ one said, when Diamond had pointed the way to the street. ‘Charlie will drive it round.’
So he acted as stretcher-bearer, through the long grass to the gate and outside, where Charlie brought the ambulance in quick time.
‘Shall I come with you?’ Diamond offered when they’d slid the stretcher inside.
‘No point, mate. He’s out to the world now and you won’t get near when he’s in emergency. You’re better off chasing the tosser who shot him.’
‘Which hospital?’
‘Charing Cross. What’s his name, by the way?’